Nov

12

November 1939

Churchill makes a rousing broadcast on the BBC

Churchill was much more popular in the country than among the political classes at Westminster. His descriptions of Hitler … a “cornered maniac”, “this monstrous apparition”, “that evil man” were much more direct than the diplomatic language that people were accustomed to from the government before the war.

We have been agreeably surprised that ten weeks have been allotted to us to get into fighting trim. … We are far better prepared to endure the worst malice of Hitler and his Huns than we were at the beginning of September. …

They [the Nazis] have not chosen to molest the British Fleet, which has awaited their attack in the Firth of Forth during last week. They recoil from the steel front of the French Army along the Maginot Line. But their docile conscripts are being crowded in vast numbers upon the frontiers of Holland and Belgium. To both these States the Nazis have given most recent and solemn guarantees. No wonder anxiety is great. No one believes one word Hitler and the Nazi Party say and therefore we must regard that situation as grave. . . . If we are conquered, all will be enslaved and the United States will be left single-handed to guard the rights of man. If we are not destroyed, all these countries will be rescued and restored to life and freedom.”

It was a constant theme of his to mention the position of the United States, which he recognised from very start of the war as having a crucial role to play in any ultimate victory.

The great English speaking Republic across the Atlantic Ocean makes no secret of its sympathies or of its self questioning, and it translates these sentiments into action of a character which anyone may judge for himself.

The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feels that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and to which the age and time are right.

Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi party machine. Let them, then, take courage amid perplexities and perils, for it may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all men in all the lands than we ever could have planned, if we had not marched together through the fire.

Follow the war as it happened …

Updated 75 years after the event…

Overlord for iPad

Links to New Book Excerpts…

Recommended

The second volume of this superb overview of the whole war.
You had to eat somewhere, sleep somewhere and occasionally you felt a desperate need to talk to someone, even though you were aware that to do so could be dangerous, if not fatal. Boredom was, in fact, a menace that no one was taught to contend with at the training school. Boredom was something individuals had to deal with themselves, and it cost quite a few men and women their lives when they came up with the wrong solution.
The Tigers were over-engineered, required raw materials that were in short supply, were time-consuming to manufacture and difficult to recover from the battlefield. Only around 1,300 of the Tiger I and fewer than 500 of the Tiger II were produced, so they were never going to make anything more than a local impact on the outcome of the fighting on the Western and Eastern fronts. Yet the myth of the Tigers, with their 88mm guns, thick armour and brutal profiles, has grown over time to the extent that they are regarded as the deadliest tanks of the Second World War.